Education Week - November 14, 2018 - 27

LETTERS to the EDITOR
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Criticism of Teacher Prep.
Prompts Strong Reaction

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Our Graduates Are Classroom Ready

same time period. If attention shrinks,
students' cognitive universe, almost by
definition, will shrink.
With all manner of information at
students' fingertips, why memorize anything? This is not a silly question, and
students increasingly ask it of their
teachers. After all, whatever knowledge
nugget they might be after, it is highly
likely that a quick search will yield it.
Traditionally, education involved stor-

ing information into students' heads. The
search engine has made it so that learning is increasingly about mastering how
to navigate databases.
If, in this new paradigm, downloading
has replaced retrieving information from
a student's internal library, what does it
purport for digital natives' memory neurons? There is still plenty that neuroscience does not know about how memories
form and are accessed, but might we

The good news is we are not starting from scratch.
While there is no single solution to simultaneously address school safety and racial disparities, many districts
in states across the country have already moved towards
strengthening their school communities. Educators have
sought to close the discipline gap and build students resilience to ACEs and toxic stress by implementing practices and policies including restorative justice, socialemotional learning, and trauma-informed discipline.
And they've seen positive results.
For example, Ed White Middle School in San Antonio-the first school in Texas to pilot restorative justice
in 2012-successfully increased attendance and decreased incidences of bullying within two years of implementing restorative practices.
Similarly, Chicago Public Schools implemented a comprehensive strategy focused on evidence-based targeted
interventions to address the root causes of students' behaviors, including trauma. Since the 2014-15 school year,
the district used trauma-focused groups, targeted skillbuilding, and restorative responses to repair relationships to help the most at-risk students excel, while keeping them in the classrooms. In 2016, the district reported
that since implementing these reforms, expulsions decreased by 57 percent and out-of-school suspensions by
65 percent. Police calls for school-based behaviors also
dropped by 19 percent.
Such approaches have been singled out by national education organizations including the National Education
Association and the School Superintendents Association as promising interventions to proactively help build
school connectedness. As research by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention has well documented,
school connectedness is a critical protective factor for
children's health and education.
This work is not limited to individual school and com-

compromise in any way the capacity to
remember if we stop "exercising" it? Or is
this tremendous neuronal power simply
rechanneled toward other goals, thereby
making new achievements possible for
today's students? The answer is largely
unknown, which is why this new emphasis on the search engine rather than engine of memory would seem to amount to
a gambling act.
In many ways, this is the best time to
learn. Never have students had more
books available than what is scanned online. Never have there been more informative TED talks they can watch, or more
MOOC courses by star lecturers they can
enroll in. Yet, many potential consumers
of this immense body of knowledge may
be too distracted to truly benefit from it. If
they lose the taste for words, develop an allergy to grammar, compress their attention
spans, and become impatient with the time
and space it takes to develop an idea, all
the "big data" at their fingertips may prove
of limited value, like a wasted resource for
a generation that won't know what to do
with it. A frowny emoji would seem apropos here. n

To the Editor:
I encourage Marc Tucker to take care
when making assumptions about the state
of teacher-preparation programs ("Teachers
Colleges: The Weakest Link," Top Performers
opinion blog, www.edweek.org, Nov. 1, 2018).
His assertions regarding such programs
simply do not hold up at my institution-
Butler University in Indianapolis. Students
admitted to and enrolled in our college of
education have the same academic credentials
as students in the university at large.
Beginning early in their undergraduate
careers, our students are immersed in
experiential education at one of our two
laboratory schools. They complete their student
teaching in a variety of schools in Indianapolis
or in one of our opportunities for student
teaching around the country or globe.
I routinely hear words of gratitude from
principals who observe the outstanding work
our graduates do in their professional lives.
I stand proud of my colleagues in our college
of education. I am confident our teacherpreparation program prepares graduates to
become effective teachers and mentors to our
country's future leaders.
Kathryn Morris

ELIAS ABOUJAOUDE is a psychiatry professor,
educator, and researcher at Stanford University,
and the author of Virtually You: The Dangerous
Powers of the e-Personality (W. W. Norton &
Company, 2011), among other books.

munity leaders. There are policy opportunities at the
federal and state level, too. The Every Student Succeeds
Act has opened the door for states to support students'
health and well-being in several important ways. First,
the law expands measures for evaluating school success.
States can now use "school climate and safety," for example, as an indicator of success. To date, 24 states have
elected to use school climate data for accountability or
improvement purposes in their ESSA plans, according to
a Learning Policy Institute analysis.
ESSA also requires education plans from each state
and local jurisdiction to describe how they will support efforts to reduce overuse of discipline practices that remove
students from the classroom. Moreover, ESSA provides
funding to advance efforts to address school climate issues,
including the implementation of school-based restorative
justice and mental-health and counseling services, as well
as professional-development opportunities for school staff
to build skills that promote a healthy school environment.
As we continue to honor the lives cut short by school
shootings, we must not allow the banner of "school safety"
to eclipse the contemporary reality that many students
face. Decades of data have shown that exclusionary practices do not make schools safer. Instead, they create racial disparities that threaten the health and well-being
of young people, creating collateral consequences that follow them into adulthood. As the voices of this new wave
of young activists call for change, we must ensure that
inclusion is central to the conversation. n
THALIA GONZÁLEZ is a senior scholar at Georgetown University
Law Center. ALEXIS ETOW is a senior attorney at ChangeLab
Solutions, a public-health nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif.
CESAR DE LA VEGA is a policy analyst at the organization.
CAMILA CRIBB-FABERSUNNE is a pediatrics resident at the
University of California, San Francisco.

Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Butler University
Indianapolis, Ind.

Ed. Colleges Provide Value
To the Editor:
In a critique of teacher education, Marc
Tucker states that "schools of education are the
weakest link in our public education system."
He writes, "It is not clear to me what our future
teachers learn in their schools of education
that is of any value to them when they begin
teaching."
I welcome constructive criticism but, I must
say, I found little that was constructive or
accurate in this blog post.
Community colleges and colleges of education
provide immense value and opportunities for
those who aspire to be teachers. As a dean of
a college of education, I meet regularly with
other deans of colleges of education from
around the country through The American
Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
I have witnessed firsthand how today's colleges
of education are preparing teachers quite
differently than they did a decade ago. In a
national strategy to prepare effective teachers,
AACTE and the Council for the Accreditation
of Educator Preparation continued to support
a reimagined clinical model of educator
preparation.
This clinical model requires students
to co-teach with established professionals
and complete sustained, yearlong clinical
experiences in teaching. Instead of relying on
course-based outcomes, teacher candidates and
pre-K-12 teachers are actively and positively
impacting their students' learning. The clinical
model can't work without the support of
teachers, principals, and superintendents.
AACTE features model teacher education
programs in its Research-to-Practice Spotlight
Series. The spotlight series aims to not
only celebrate successful programs but also
provide models of exemplary practice for
other institutions in the nascent stages of
partnership formation.
Tucker is right in recognizing the challenges
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Education Week - November 14, 2018

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